The term is not scary — at last not in a visceral, skin-crawling sense. Scientists have shown that the likely 2 degrees of global warming to come this century will be extremely dangerous, but, you know, “2 degrees” is hardly a phrase from nightmares and horror films.

How about “rat explosion”?

As the climate warms, rats in New York, Philadelphia and Boston are breeding faster — and experts warn of a population explosion.

But it’s not just rats, think locusts and marauding urchins!

Rats are just the beginning. Biologists have calculated that with the expected warming this century of 2 degrees Celsius, populations of dangerous crop-eating insects are likely to explode as temperate areas warm, reducing crop yields by 25 to 50 percent. Similar horrors lurk offshore, where biologists have found that a population explosion of purple sea urchins — “cockroaches of the ocean” — is choking out other denizens of Pacific kelp forests.

Forget rodents, we are being over by pop-psychologists:

The worst thing about ignorant, uninformed waffle is that the people doing it are Professors of Psych:

In recent years, psychologists have accused conservatives of being more innately fearful than liberals, but that never quite squared with the fact that conservatives express less fear over environmental problems.

There’s a difference between fear of real things, and fear of fake ones. Anyone who studies conservatives knows that they are afraid of losing jobs, quality of life, and the building blocks of a fragile, brilliant civilization. Anyone who studies the modern incarnation of “progressives” knows they worry about forests that are greening, crops that are increasing, and whether we have got the labels right on toilet doors.

Naturally, we all can’t wait to go back to a time when CO2 levels were perfect and rat plagues never happened.